The Grumpy Paladin » Loot and Looting

The Ridiculousness of the Hecatomb Cap

Tal — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:49:35 +0000

I figured I’d start with warrior, since it gives me the opportunity to rant about Neptunal Head.

TP:

Rune Chopper/Rose Strap/Fire Bomblet
Walahra Turban/Fortitude Torque/Fowling Earring/Brutal Earring
Adaman Hauberk/Dusk Gloves/Rajas Ring/Blood Ring
Amemet Mantle/Swift Belt/Byakko’s Haidate/Aurum Sabatons

All in all, this is probably the set I’m happiest with in all my jobs. There’s some room for upgrades that will probably never happen, namely a Toreador Ring instead of a Blood Ring, Cuchulain’s Mantle instead of Amemet, and a Velocious Belt instead of Swift.

+10 Store TP (Rose Strap, Brutal Earring, Rajas Ring) for times I’m subbing Samurai for a six-hit build. For all other not-/SAM builds a Rose Strap turns into a Pole Strap.

I love the Rune Chopper. Having +9%Haste in one slot is pretty god damn amazing… when you have a decent Red Mage. See, that latent effect on The Choppa (and, yes, you have to say it that way), is that for 9% Haste, it costs you 3MP per tic. If you have zero MP, then no haste. A Red Mage’s refresh spell gives 3MP per tic. So, a Red Mage has to refresh you in order to get that latest effect. Not surprisingly, a lot of time asking a Red Mage to refresh a Warrior is like the mountain moving to Mohammed. In those instances I just use the good ol’ Perdu Voulge. Ares Cuirass is awesome and all, but I don’t believe it fully activates the latent with it’s refresh effect.

The only problem with The Choppa is the amazing lack of an MP pool I have on WAR. When I weaponskill, I drop down to 10MP. Even though Refresh keeps my MP pool even, if the RDM is slow on the update, I could believably lose out on some haste for a bit. I have one MP merit to satisfy having an MP pool, but I wouldn’t put much more into it than that. This guy nicely explains why (even if it’s from 2006, jesus fuck this game is old and I’ve been playing it for far too long).

When I do get Refresh to feed to The Choppa, I’m suddenly wearing too much haste. +9 from the Choppa, +5 from Turban, +3 from Dusk, +4 from Swift, +5 from Haidate, and +2 from Sabatons, or 28% haste. Gear haste, that is, haste you’re wearing, caps at somewhere between 25~26%, so the number to hit is generally 26%. So I’m wearing excess haste. I have to lose 2 haste, and the easiest fix there is to replace the Aurum Sabatons. I don’t have anything to replace them with though! I could upgrade Ares Sabatons for +7 Accuracy/+7 Attack I suppose, but that seems like such a marginal upgrade from the other nice bonuses Aurum Sabatons provide, especially considering the cost.

I figure the most ideal situation would be to get a Velocious Belt. Then I could come up with a build of something like Choppa, Turban, V.Belt (+6 instead of +4), Haidate, Sabatons. This comes to 27%ish percent, and while still excessive, I could then possibly upgrade Ares Gauntlets, which have a nice +10 accuracy on them, and ideally could even let me switch out the precious (Adaman Hauberk) for Ares Cuirass. Maybe.

Raging Rush:

Rune Chopper/Rose Strap/Fire Bomblet
Aurum Armet/Fortitude Torque/Fowling Earring/Brutal Earring
Adaman Hauberk/Hecatomb Mittens/Rajas Ring/Ruby Ring
Amemet Mantle/Warwolf Belt/Byakko’s Haidate/Hecatomb Leggings

Man, I hate Raging Rush.

I hate Raging Rush because of how utterly, stupidly useful it is. I hate Raging Rush because the weaponskill animation doesn’t even come close to what the weaponskill is named. I hate Raging Rush because I have so much useful gear for it.

Raging Rush is one of those pesky “can critical” weaponskills. The more DEX you have, the higher your chances of critting during it are. DEX also increases your accuracy; for every 3DEX, you get 2 Accuracy.

I fucking hate using the Aurum Armet, but it’s the only headpiece I have. I built my Kupo d’etat hat for RNG and Slugwinder, since that weaponskill is stupidly inaccurate, so I can’t build that for WAR. I don’t even have an askar zuchetto to use. No, I’m stuck with +3STR in this stupid slot for probably a very long time. Ideally, I would use a Hecatomb Cap, but I’m pretty sure I will never see one of those ever.

More on that hat later.

King’s Justice:

Rune Chopper/Rose Strap/Fire Bomblet
Aurum Armet/Soil Gorget/Fowling Earring/Brutal Earring
Adaman Hauberk/Hecatomb Mittens/Rajas Ring/Ruby Ring
Amemet Mantle/Warrior’s Stone/Byakko’s Haidate/Hecatomb Leggings

I love King’s Justice. It’s too bad that for it’s utility, I really don’t get much more mileage out of it than I do Raging Rush. The nice thing is that this set is much more accurate than my Raging Rush set is. Soil is +10 accuracy (supposedly), and the Warrior’s Stone has the same amount of STR as a Warwolf Belt(5), but a bonus +7 accuracy on top of it.

King’s Justice can’t crit, so the only role DEX plays here is accuracy. Again, that fucking Aurum Armet rears it’s ugly head. Again, the ideal piece here is a Hecatomb Cap. Actually, for something like King’s Justice, I should just replace the Armet with my even fuglier Optical Hat (+10 accuracy), bust WAR AF2 legs out of storage, and use them (+5STR, +1% Double Attack). The real problem there is that I lose five inventory spaces and have to wear the O.Hat for what amounts to a marginal increase(+2STR). Ideally, I’d be using a pair of Haichryu Haidate for the +10STR, but Sarameya never drops that. Ever.

Steel Cyclone:

Rune Chopper/Rose Strap/Fire Bomblet
Genbu’s Kabuto/Fortitude Torque/Fowling Earring/Brutal Earring
Ares Cuirass/Hecatomb Mittens/Rajas Ring/Ruby Ring
Amemet Mantle/Warwolf Belt/Byakko’s Haidate/Hecatomb Leggings

You may be noticing that, at this point, a lot of my weaponskill sets look the same. This is very true.

Steel Cyclone is probably my favorite warrior weaponskill. I love the animation, and I love that it’s only one hit. I love that I can stack it with Warrior’s Charge and it’s got +75% STR and VIT (hence the kabuto and the cuirass) modifiers… The only thing that sucks about it is that it requires at least 200TP to be useful. Yeah, the big problem with Steel Cyclone is that unless you’re zerging and/or using Mighty Strikes, chances are you’re not going to be using Steel Cyclone. That’s why this particular set doesn’t have very much accuracy – if you’re zerging, chances are you have accuracy songs on you which will make up for any lost accuracy.

This also nicely illustrates the weakness of Ares Body for WAR. Adaman Hauberk comes with a flat out +15 accuracy, and an additional +10DEX on top of it, making it about +21~22 accuracy, on a single piece, let alone the +15 attack and +10STR. The Cuirass, which has more STR and attack as well as refresh, has zero accuracy on it.

So, that stupid Aurum Armet I use has +3STR, +4 Accuracy, and +4 attack. Most WARs worth their salt use a Hecatomb Cap. Except I don’t have one, because I don’t camp Fafnir and in about the ten Odins and one billion chambers we’ve done in Einherjar, we’ve seen ZERO neptunal head abjurations. Also an E.Body costs something like eleventy billion points and I will have no points anymore from here until the end of time to ever get an N.Head even if one does drop.

So, why do I pine for such a piece of equipment?

That is eleven strength on a head piece. That Adaman Hauberk I use, which is a body piece? Yeah, that only has +10 strength. This in of itself is stupid and excessive and ridiculous. However, here is the second best piece you can get for that slot.

You can get this if you level the first fifteen jobs to 66 and can beat the final limit break quest for each of those fifteen jobs.

I would really like to meet the Square-Enix designers some day, because I’ve never actually seen a man shove his head up his ass before. It must be quite the feat.

Such Masterful Work, You

Tal — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:32:50 +0000

I’ve actually had it for about ten days now, but I’ve been asked why I didn’t post about it… So, here you go.

Big thanks to Darkus and Lems for making the ingots, my salvage group for their perseverance, and the First International Bank of Red Magery for the last few million.

WAR and PLD set analysis to come forthwith.

A Rush To the… Something

Tal — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:12:46 +0000

I’m down to 2,000 ISP, or 10 runic portal permits remaining.

I’m five assaults to captain rank.

I have all the parts needed for Ares Body, but they’re all in pieces; I need to find a smither.

I have even yet to start on any Magian weapon, and I know of at least three I can use.

Will Talint have to merit to inflate his imperial standing? Will he endlessly navigate the halls of Alzadaal with his salvage permit? Is he ever going to finish his Ares body? Will he even start his magian weapon escapades?

Time Management, Gil, and Ares Body Progress

Tal — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:21:08 +0000

First of all, I’d like to thank the dipshit who has decided to take this time, with the influx of khroma ore after Bonanza, to skill-up his smithing skill to 100 and keeping the price of said ore at 500k, rather than try and let the market crash for a little while so everybody benefits. You are a very valuable member of this game, and I hope that your myopia and impatience (while not unexpected) continue to serve you well.

Anyway. If there is a time in which how awful I am at the endgame has shown itself, it has been upgrading this Ares Body. I got the pieces back in October/Novemberish. I didn’t seriously start trying to upgrade this body until January. It’s now February. I have four ingots, with materials for two more ready to be made. Obtaining gil has always been difficult. My strategy before (and had worked well) was to play the market, namely buy things low, and sell things high. This is how I was able to fund assorted PLD pieces and most of my WAR gear.

However, age has taken its toll on this game. Through repeated bouts of inflation and stagnation, all the gil in this game has been more or less consolidated into two groups: HNMLSes and RMTs (at least on Hades). Through my own myopia, I burned most of the HNMLS bridges a few years back since I didn’t want to be a part of that corrupt, insidious nonsense of ePenis waving and faux elitist bullshit. I hadn’t expected for them to simply just start fucking selling everything that dropped, but I guess everyone wants a fucking relic weapon. And RMT is, well, RMT. It just cheapens the victory. Plus I’m poor and can’t afford to throw that kind of money around.

So I joined a sky merc linkshell. Again. Because I never fucking learn ever. After about two weeks of piss-poor payouts and remembering how much I hate sky, that didn’t last. Spending twelve hours a week to MAYBE get a million gil wasn’t even close to worth it. I could spend those twelve hours mining Zhayolm. Getting two khroma ore in those twelve hours would actually meet the best expectations in mercing a sky linkshell.

Oh, and thanks to the other linkshells selling Haidate for 3.5m, forcing us to meet that price to stay competitive. You’re cool people.

DynaTav Fails

Tal — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:42:58 +0000

What my Dyna linkshell hit roughly on Dyna-Tav over the weekend.

18 Hornets
9 Demons
3 Tauri
15 Fomor
46 Leeches
16 Makara
10 Vanguard Eyes
3 Timer/SJ mobs

Total AF/-1 gained: DRK Hat x2, DRK body, WAR legs.

I honestly don’t know if that’s a decent amount of mobs hit. It feels like it is. Especially when you can only bring 18 people for two hours, and there was an unfortunate wipe towards the end.

What I do know: It’s a bit fucking tiresome doing DynaTav over and over again to barely get any -1. It’s also really stupid to put a megaboss in a zone that does absolutely nothing upon a kill.